Notebook

Sunset: 4:44pm. A high in the 50s and a low of 39 degrees. Last night the clocks fell back an hour, and it’s my favorite moment of the year because we create more night. Changing the clocks should be the biggest celebration of the year, with parades, feasts, and fireworks. Because if we can rearrange time, we can do anything. Invent new colors. Eliminate money. Add more days to the week. Rewind the internet to 2004. Erase the borders on maps.

We celebrated last night with a heavy mahjong session: four of us talking junk and eating spicy noodles for seven hours while the tiles clacked and swirled like an ancient ceremony.

This morning I woke up feeling acutely aware of time as I considered everything I’d like to do before the year ends. Buckle down and finish this damned novel once and for all. Need to get back to writing for two hours every morning. And I’d like to return to cold night-running, maybe five miles each weeknight. It’s easy to feel ambitious when you’re still under the covers. Then I dozed to the holler and hum of the crowd along First Avenue as it cheered the city’s marathon runners.

Pye Corner Audio – Sleep Games

Sleep Games | Ghost Box, 2012 | More

Sunset: 5:47pm. Sunny with a high of 53 and lows in the upper thirties. There’s a new supermoon tonight, which means the moon is invisible but massive as it draws near its closest point to Earth.

Writing. It’s such a slippery, terrible habit. Always thinking I should be writing. Or that I’m not writing enough. Or I’m not writing well. How did I wind up in this position? Maybe writing isn’t so important anymore. The baton has passed to other forms. Or perhaps it’s more vital than ever, this need to pin down and make sense of an increasingly insensible world.

Today I learned the definition of abattoir—one of those half-familiar words I’ve glossed over whenever it appears. I’d always thought it referred to something churchy and medieval, maybe a monastery. But it’s a slaughterhouse. Now I’m wondering what the hell I was reading where my religious definition made any kind of sense.

But I can’t remember. I seem to remember less and less. I worry about my attention span. I worry about my brain. I often think about an essay Douglas Coupland published last summer. He notes that “around 2010 my own brain started feeling truly different. I realised that I was never going to go back to my old, pre-internet brain: I’d been completely rewired. Ten years later I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like.” Coupland takes comfort in the idea that we’re all in this together, that we’ve all been “neurally homogenised.” But I find this idea frightening, even if this means punishing myself for no longer living up to some romanticized ideal of literary discipline.

Maybe the only solution is some cognitive leap similar to how the Constructivists and Futurists plunged into the future a century ago, determined to fuse with the machine. Embrace speed. Groove on distraction. Let everything get garbled and weird.

In this spirit, today C. and I visited the Frick Collection, where Renaissance paintings hang in Marcel Breuer‘s brutalist ziggurat. The only way to access any information about each painting was via your phone. People gazed into their personal devices, hunting for details as they stood before oil portraits of the dead. I go to museums to get away from screens, so I walked around feeling very old and confused.

Topdown Dialectic – 03

/​\​\​02 | Aught, 2014 | Bandcamp

My new favorite band: blurred transmissions from an unknown station that conjure the lowlight hiss and mystery of vintage Basic Channel. Be sure to check out their new release on Peak Oil.

Sunset: 5:51pm. Partly cloudy in New York with a high of 60 degrees and lows dipping into the 40s at last. Now begins my favorite season, the deep stretch of time when the landscape weighs upon the mind and perhaps the other way around. This is the season of choral music and childhood memories drifting through the heating vents, of headlights in the gloom and trees that look like old gentlemen.

Tonight I’m grateful I’ve returned to this channel in the static, writing for whoever might find it. The idea of an audience, real or imagined, forces me to move beyond fractured scribblings in my notebook towards complete sentences and, occasionally, better thoughts. I’d like to read more blogs. If you’re still broadcasting on the information superhighway like it’s 2004, please let me know so I can add your station to my feed.

Gas – Oktember

Oktember | Mille Plateaux, 1999 | Bandcamp

Sunset: 5:52pm. A waning crescent moon on Halloween with a high of 64 degrees. I’m back in New York City, where everything is smaller and harder, and the city is constantly inserting itself into my thoughts like another person in the room. New York is still glittering and grand; the problem is me. I’ve had enough input. Enough inspiration.

My body moves down First Avenue, but my brains are still in the desert, driving around the quiet margins of Vegas through roomy streets with tan bungalows and garbled strip malls with every service from every nation. C. and I have decided to move to Nevada next spring—partially for the lower cost of living, mostly for the aesthetic of night driving down desert parkways with neon spraying across the windshield and the Chromatics on the radio.

This is the plan, and I’ve made a note to reread this entry six months from now. Because life has a funny way. If you want to hear God laugh, etc. But I hope I’ll be reading this from the desert.

Chromatics – Lady Night Drive

Cherry | Italians Do It Better, 2017 | More

Twentynine Palms. Sunset: 6:00pm. Sunny with a high of 80 degrees and lows in the forties. The Mojave desert is my favorite place on the planet. For fifteen years, this landscape has pulled at my thoughts like a magnet. Maybe it’s the cadence: Groom Lake. Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range. Devil’s Hole. Mythic names that speak of salvation and redemption.

The desert is a land of religious vision, the home of desperate saints and ascetics dragging themselves across the sand in search of revelation. Airplane graveyards glint in the desert sun, perfectly preserved by the unoxidized air. I once heard about a woman who can tell your future by deciphering the contrails of experimental military aircraft. Driving out of the town of Mojave, there’s a sign that says, “If my people humble themselves and pray, I will heal their land.”

The desert offers a promise: drive a little further, keep racing through nothing and you might see something grand, something that will help you make sense of the world. A tragic ghost town. An abandoned gag shop that sold alien beef jerky during the UFO craze in the summer of ’71. A place in Death Valley where a woman performed an opera each night to empty seats. A historical marker where they detonated the first atomic bomb. And so much sky and land there’s nothing to think about except something resembling god.

Sunny with a high of 80 degrees and a low of 48. A slow day in the desert was spent watching the shadows of the Joshua trees grow while thinking about the future. How to live and concentrate again. How to start the next chapter. How to find some quiet.

In the midst of this silence, C. and I heard The New York Times featured After the End as a critic’s pick, noting that it “provides a place for anyone suffering loss or battered by contemporary life to mourn, meditate and perhaps heal a little.”

Mojave desert. Sunset: 6:03pm. There’s a full moon tonight, a hunter’s moon. Like a scene from a noir film, C. and I pulled over by the side of a deserted highway and watched the moon rise above all this endless space where the silence carries weight, a cosmic pressure against the skin.

The sun went down at 5:48pm, the high was 83 degrees, and the moon is nearly full. This morning C. and I drove through Sedona, drawn by the cadence of its name but repelled by the hucksters and faith-dealers: establishments with names like Gratitude Latitude, New Energy Café, and Sacred Elements Energy Balancing Center. We did not stop. Instead we visited the Chapel of the Holy Cross, a peak-modernist Catholic chapel inspired by the geometry of the Empire State Building that juts out of a red butte. I’m writing this while chomping nicotine gum with caffeine nerves, so maybe my energy could use some realignment.

Phoenix is impossible, but its cacti are Platonic. After scrolling through its grids for hours without feeling like the scenery had changed, we checked into a Ballardian hotel along the interstate. The bathroom mirror is Bluetooth-enabled for reasons I cannot comprehend.

Dirty Beaches – Golden Desert Sun

From Golden Desert Sun/Night Drive | Italian Beach Babes, 2010 | Bandcamp

A highlight from Alex Zhang Hungtai’s Dirty Beaches project that rewires jittery Americana into something haunted.

Moon: waxing gibbous, almost full. A high of 68 degrees and clouds, dust, and a spatter of rain. Scrolled past a Vegas tableau of an abandoned baby stroller and a bottle of champagne on the median of Dean Martin Drive. Lunch at a Malaysian restaurant on the second floor of a strip mall crammed with markets from nearly every Asian nation, then we continued combing through the sprawl. I love the garbled energy here, the thrum of people around the world drawn to the desert, to a landscape that once belonged to religious visions, and now there’s a city invented solely for hustling people—a city built around an airport. There’s something bracingly honest and futuristic about this place.

We drove south until we picked up Route 66 in Arizona, its diners and gas stations faded and empty, or else transformed into photogenic trinket shops: the ghosts of a lost nation.

Farben – Sexing Dean Martin

Farben | Klang, 1998 | Boomkat

Sunset: 6:01pm. Shocking skies with a high of 83 and a low of 50 degrees. C. and I headed straight to Chinatown for ridiculously excellent dim sum, then spent the day orbiting the margins of Vegas and thinking about how to live. We’ve been fantasizing about living in the desert for a solid decade, and the idea of living at the farthest edge of the Vegas sprawl has a solid Neuromancer ring to it. Perhaps this will be our future.

Burger/Ink – Twelve Miles High

Las Vegas | Matador, 1998 | Boomkat

Night flight to Vegas. First proper trip in twenty-two months and my fear of flying has not improved. We crossed a line of thunderstorms along the eastern seaboard, and I searched for cosmic meaning in the turbulence. Although I know the science and statistics by heart, turbulence still leaves me clawing at the seat, overwhelmed by full-bodied vibrations of doom and a sudden belief in fate—a desire to repent and a craving for god, any kind will do. Then the air grows calm again, I forget my vows, and I return to gazing into a screen.

Despite my anxieties, I love flying at night, suspended in a timeless non-space while I watch the electrified grids of distant civilizations spread out below.

Transient Waves – Slightly More Than Flight

Transient Waves | i, 1996 | Bandcamp